He’s blaming Quebec. That doesn’t make any sense.

On its face, the Orange Julep may look like a loud but innocuous giant orange ball sitting steps away from Montreal’s Decarie Expressway. Its signature drink, a sweet and frothy mix of orange juice and milk, may be threatening only to diabetics and the lactose-intolerant.

But don’t let appearances deceive you. The Orange Julep is dangerous. The Orange Julep will break a proud man in half.

Just ask Kevin O’Leary. The erstwhile frontrunner in the Conservative party leadership campaign came to the Julep full of his signature swagger, convinced its patrons would hand him the keys to the province. And yet the man who proved his mettle in Dragons’ Dens and Shark Tanks left Julep broken, humbled and unable to carry on. The Julep was his Waterloo.

“I was hanging out at the Orange Julep every week,” O’Leary told the Globe and Mail’s Laura Stone, as he nursed his wounds from the safety of his Toronto office. “Like, what does it take to crack that province?”

The poor bastard. Honestly, I can’t think of a better place to measure the Quebec zeitgeist than from the parking lot of a weathered tourist trap located next to a discount shopping mall and a derelict horserace track. After all, the Julep was bumping back in 1960 — the last time O’Leary actually lived in Montreal. And in a city full of landmarks, O’Leary was drawn to the one painted Day-Glo orange.

To win Conservative hearts, O’Leary could have gone to the Saguenay, where the conservative streak has run reliably blue for decades. He might have meandered through the Quebec City region, home to the Conservative party’s regional power base as well as the lily-white citizenry so representative of the province beyond Montreal’s shores.

But no, O’Leary bravely chose the Julep to measure the province’s pulse. The Julep is located in one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse neighbourhoods in the country, where the Liberal incumbent beat his Conservative opponent by 43 percentage points — on an island where the party he hoped to lead has never held a seat.

If only someone had told O’Leary the rule about anglo politicians speaking French in Quebec: You only need to be good enough to be understood — and bad enough to be pitied.

This is where Mr. Wonderful thought Quebec’s Conservative heartbeat beat loudest. And it didn’t beat for him. In fact, people didn’t even recognize him. “I thought I’d get more support, I have to honest with you,” he said.

There are other examples of O’Leary’s keen political instincts at work. His troubles with the French language, for example. In the dying days of his campaign, the conspicuously arrogant O’Leary had become circumspect over his abilities in la langue de René Lévesque, convinced they would only further hurt his chances in the province.

His humility was so blinding that he failed to note that he spoke French better than at least three quarters of his opponents. He also apparently forgot that making a show of improving one’s French (as he was doing with gusto) is a sure-fire way to endear oneself to Quebec voters. If only someone had told him the rule about anglo politicians speaking French in Quebec: You only need to be good enough to be understood — and bad enough to be pitied. Modesty didn’t serve O’Leary well in this race.

Neither did math, apparently. O’Leary claimed Quebec would be crucial to the next Conservative victory — “the Florida of Canada”, as he described it, for its political sway, if not for the tendency of its citizens to bugger off to the Sunshine State when the weather turns.

If only O’Leary had called Conservative party headquarters, or consulted Wikipedia for 20 seconds. Had he done so, he would have found his adopted party has done quite well without Quebec. Stephen Harper won three consecutive elections without much help in the province. In 2011, Harper won a majority government with all of five Quebec seats. Ontario is Canada’s Florida. Quebec is more like New Jersey with better cheese.

Surely O’Leary’s musings about Quebec are a product of his well-hidden modesty. Surely they are not those of a comically out-of-touch dilettante whose knowledge of Quebec extends only as far as the first seven years of his life, when he lived in Montreal.

Surely his decision to duck out of the Conservative race had nothing to do with avoiding a possibly embarrassing fundraising disclosure, or the seriously impressive opposition file replete with tales of cavorting NHL players and the young women who gravitate to them. Surely he just wants to go on peddling O’Leary-branded plonk on the shopping network, now that he’s not wasting time watching the Bruins lose.

Though he lost the Battle of Orange Julep, O’Leary has magnanimously pledged his full support and peerless instincts to Maxime Bernier, his former foil. Perhaps he can campaign for Bernier at Expo 67, or wear a sandwich board by the old Forum. Either way, Bernier would be a fool to shun the advice of this brilliant political mind.

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